Arab Jews, Palestinian Refugees and Israel's Folly Politics

By: Yehouda Shenhav
October 2006
Distributed by email by David Shasha

In an article in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz from 22.10.06, the Reuters
Agency reported that World Jewish groups began a global campaign calling for
recognition of Jews from Arab countries (i.e. Arab Jews) as refugees in the Middle
East conflict. Stanley Urman, executive director of Justice for Jews from
Arab Countries (JJAC) was quoted saying that:

The world sees the plight of Palestinian refugees, and not withstanding
their plight, there must be recognition that Jews from Arab countries are also
victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), a U.S.-based coalition of
Jewish organizations, is one of the groups coordinating the campaign which aims to
record testimonies of Jews from Arab countries, list asset losses and lobby
foreign governments on their behalf. Reuters also reported that JJAC is
working in tandem with Israel's Ministry of Justice, which is collecting and
registering testimonials, affidavits and property claims. The daily internet
paper Y-NET (October 24 2006 under the title: "Jews of Arab Countries prepare
yourself to claim compensation") also reported that the new minister of
justice Meir Shitrit is behind this "new effort."

However this effort is all but novel. It started 6 years ago in a folly
attempt to use the Arab Jews and their histories to counter-balance the
Palestinian claim for the so called "right of return". The campaign has tried to
create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Arab Jews, whose origins are in
Middle Eastern countries - depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War
of Independence. The campaign's Jewish proponents hope their efforts will
prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians, and
reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in
exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost"
assets. Whereas in the past, the State of Israel and Jewish organizations have
denied any linkage between the two groups and argued that the campaign was
launched in the interest of the Arab Jews (see Chapter 3 in my book The Arab
Jews, Stanford University Press, 2006), today all parties involved acknowledge
that the main objective of the campaign is not to secure the interest of the
Arab Jews, but rather to counter-balance the Palestinian political demands. I
would like to argue that the idea of drawing this analogy constitutes a
mistaken reading of history, imprudent politics, and moral injustice; and that any
analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands
is folly in historical and political terms

Bill Clinton launched the campaign in July 2000 in an interview with
Israel's Channel One, in which he disclosed that an agreement to recognize Jews from
Arab lands as refugees materialized at the Camp David summit. Ehud Barak,
the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, stepped up and enthusiastically
expounded on his "achievement" in an interview with Dan Margalit. It should be
noted, that past Israeli governments had refrained from issuing declarations of
this sort. There were at least three reasons for that. First, there has been
concern that any such proclamation will underscore what Israel has tried to
repress and forget: the Palestinians' demand for return. Second, there has been
anxiety that such a declaration would encourage property claims submitted by
Jews against Arab states and, in response, Palestinian counter-claims to lost
property. Third, such declarations would require Israel to update its school
textbooks and history, and devise a new narrative by which the Arab Jews
journeyed to the country under duress, without being fueled by Zionist
aspirations. At Camp David, Ehud Barak decided that the right of return issue was not
really on the agenda, so he thought he had the liberty to indulge the analogy
between the Palestinian refugees and the Arab Jews, only rhetorically.

Characteristically, rather than really dealing with issues as a leader, in a
fashion that might lead to mutual reconciliation, Barak and later prime ministers
Ariel Sharom and Ehud Oulmert acted like shopkeepers. Furthermore, whereas
the article in Ha'aretz mentioned above reports that the Ministry of Justice
has already received thousands of claims to date, in actuality the campaign's
results thus far are meager. The Jewish organizations involved have not
inspired much enthusiasm in Israel, or among Jews overseas. It has yet to extract a
single noteworthy declaration from any major Israeli politician. This comes
as no surprise: The campaign has a forlorn history whose details are worth
revisiting. Sometimes recounting history has a very practical effect.

The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) who initiated
this linkage was founded in the 1970s. Yigal Allon, then foreign minister,
worried that WOJAC would become a hotbed of what he called "ethnic mobilization."
But WOJAC was not formed to assist the Arab Jews; it was invented as a
deterrent to block claims harbored by the Palestinian national movement,
particularly claims related to compensation and the right of return. At first glance,
the use of the term "refugees" for the Arab Jews was not unreasonable. After
all, the word had occupied a central place in historical and international
legal discourses after World War II. United Nations Security Council Resolution
242 from 1967 referred to a just solution to "the problem of refugees in the
Middle East." In the 1970s, Arab countries tried to fine-tune the
resolution's language so that it would refer to "Arab refugees in the Middle East,"
but
the U.S. government, under the direction of ambassador to the UN Arthur
Goldberg, opposed this revision. A working paper prepared in 1977 by Cyrus Vance,
then U.S. secretary of state, ahead of scheduled international meetings in
Geneva, alluded to the search for a solution to the "problem of refugees,"
without specifying the identities of those refugees. Israel lobbied for this
formulation. WOJAC, which tried to introduce use of the concept "Jewish
refugees," failed.

The Arabs were not the only ones to object to the phrase. Many Zionist Jews
from around the world opposed WOJAC's initiative. Organizers of the current
campaign would be wise to study the history of WOJAC, an organization which
transmogrified over its years of activity from a Zionist to a post-Zionist
entity. It is a tale of unexpected results arising from political activity. The
WOJAC figure who came up with the idea of "Jewish refugees" was Yaakov Meron,
head of the Justice Ministry's Arab legal affairs department. Meron
propounded the most radical thesis ever devised concerning the history of Jews in
Arab
lands. He claimed Jews were expelled from Arab countries under policies
enacted in concert with Palestinian leaders - and he termed these policies
"ethnic cleansing." Vehemently opposing the dramatic Zionist narrative, Meron
claimed that Zionism had relied on romantic, borrowed phrases ("Magic Carpet,"
"Operation Ezra and Nehemiah") in the description of Mizrahi immigration waves
to conceal the "fact" that Jewish migration was the result of "Arab expulsion
policy." In a bid to complete the analogy drawn between Palestinians and
Mizrahi Jews, WOJAC publicists claimed that the Arab Jewish immigrants lived in
refugee camps in Israel during the 1950s (i.e., ma'abarot or transit camps),
just like the Palestinian refugees.

The organization's claims infuriated many Arab Jews in Israel who defined
themselves as Zionists. As early as 1975, at the time of WOJAC's formation,
Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu declared: "We are not refugees. [Some of us]
came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations."
Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq,
adamantly opposed the analogy: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands
as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists." In
a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: "I have this to say: I am
not a refugee." He added: "I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull
that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to
define me as a refugee." The opposition was so vociferous that Ora Schweitzer,
chair of WOJAC's political department, asked the organization's secretariat
to end its campaign. She reported that members of Strasburg's Jewish community
were so offended that they threatened to boycott organization meetings
should the topic of "Sephardi Jews as refugees" ever come up again. Such
remonstration precisely predicted the failure of the current organization, Justice
for
Jews from Arab Countries to inspire enthusiasm for its efforts.

Also alarmed by WOJAC's stridency, the Foreign Ministry proposed that the
organization bring its campaign to a halt on the grounds that the description
of Arab Jews as refugees was a double-edged sword. Israel, ministry officials
pointed out, had always adopted a stance of ambiguity on the complex issue
raised by WOJAC. In 1949, Israel even rejected a British-Iraqi proposal for
population exchange - Iraqi Jews for Palestinian refugees - due to concerns that
it would subsequently be asked to settle "surplus refugees" within its own
borders. The foreign minister deemed WOJAC a Phalangist, zealous group, and
asked that it cease operating as a "state within a state." In the end, the
ministry closed the tap on the modest flow of funds it had transferred to WOJAC.
Then justice minister Yossi Beilin fired Yaakov Meron from the Arab legal
affairs department. Today, no serious researcher in Israel or overseas embraces
WOJAC's extreme claims.

Moreover, WOJAC, which intended to promote Zionist claims and assist Israel
in its conflict with Palestinian nationalism, accomplished the opposite: It
presented a confused Zionist position regarding the dispute with the
Palestinians, and infuriated many Mizrahi Jews around the world by casting them as
victims bereft of positive motivation to immigrate to Israel. WOJAC subordinated
the interests of Mizrahi Jews (particularly with regard to Jewish property
in Arab lands) to what it erroneously defined as Israeli national interests.
The organization failed to grasp that defining Mizrahi Jews as refugees opens
a Pandora's box and ultimately harms all parties to the dispute, Jews and
Arabs alike.

The State of Israel, the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish rganizations
learned nothing from this woeful legacy. Hungry for a magic solution to the
refugee question, they have adopted the refugee analogy and are lobbying for
it all over the world. It would be interesting to hear the education
minister's reaction to the historical narrative presented nowadays by these Jewish
organizations. Should Yael Tamir establish a committee of ministry experts to
revise school textbooks in accordance with this new post-Zionist genre?

Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the
analogy drawn between Palestinians and Arab Jews is unfounded. Palestinian
refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were
destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the
borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own
volition. In contrast, Arab Jews arrived to Israel under the initiative of the
State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some arrived of their own free will;
others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab
lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.

The history of this immigration is complex, and cannot be subsumed within a
facile explanation. Many of the newcomers lost considerable property, and
there can be no question that they should be allowed to submit individual
property claims against Arab states (up to the present day, the State of Israel and
WOJAC have blocked the submission of claims on this basis). The unfounded,
immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly
embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of
many Arab Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.

Jewish anxieties about discussing the question of 1948 are understandable.
But this question will be addressed in the future, and it is clear that any
peace agreement will
have to contain a solution to the refugee problem. It's reasonable to assume
that as final status agreements between Israelis and Palestinians are
reached, an international fund will be formed with the aim of compensating
Palestinian refugees for the hardships caused them by the establishment of the State
of Israel. Israel will surely be asked to contribute generously to such a
fund.

In this connection, the idea of reducing compensation obligations by
designating Arab Jews as refugees might become very tempting. But it is wrong to use
scarecrows to chase away politically and morally valid claims advanced by
Palestinians. The "creative accounting" manipulation concocted by the refugee
analogy only adds insult to injury, and widens the psychological gap between
Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians might abandon hopes of redeeming a right
of return (as, for example, Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikai claims);
but this is not a result to be adduced via creative accounting.

Any peace agreement (which seems now far then ever) must be validated by
Israeli recognition of past wrongs and suffering, and the forging of a just
solution. The creative accounts proposed by the refugee analogy by the Israeli
Ministry of Justice and Jewish organizations turns Israel into a morally and
politically spineless bookkeeper.

Yehouda Shenhav is a professor at Tel Aviv University and the editor of
Theory Criticism, an Israeli journal in the area of critical theory and cultural
studies. He is the author of The Arab Jews, Stanford University Press, 2006.